PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Ben Domingue
AU  - Jason Fletcher
TI  - Separating Measured Genetic and Environmental Effects: Evidence Linking Parental Genotype and Adopted Child Outcomes
AID  - 10.1101/698464
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 698464
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/07/11/698464.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/07/11/698464.full
AB  - The bio-demographic literature has begun to use genome wide summary scores (polygenic scores) to predict a broad set of demographic and socioeconomic outcomes to understand the importance of genetics as well as potential life course mechanisms. However, a largely unacknowledged issue with these studies is that parental genetics impact both child environments and child genetics, leaving the effects of polygenic scores difficult to interpret. This paper uses multi-generational data that collected parental polygenic scores and child outcomes for 30,000 adopted and biological children, which allows us to separate the influence of parental polygenic scores on children outcomes between environmental (adopted children) and environmental and genetic (biological children) effects. Our results show large effects of parental polygenic scores on adopted children’s schooling, suggesting that polygenic scores combine genetic and environmental influences and that additional research designs will need to be used to separate these estimated impacts.